


Free Wine

by jedishampoo



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-01
Updated: 2011-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:39:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedishampoo/pseuds/jedishampoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hakkai and Sanzo reached an understanding almost right after they met.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Free Wine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jenniebart](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jenniebart).



**Title:** Free Wine  
 **Author:** jedishampoo  
 **Rating:** NC-l7  
 **Pairing:** Hakkai/Sanzo  
 **Summary:** Hakkai and Sanzo reached an understanding almost right after they met.  
 **Warnings:** language, sexual situations.  
 **Author's notes:** Yay, Saiyuki fic again! Written for jenniebart on the [](http://community.livejournal.com/valentine_smut/profile)[**valentine_smut**](http://community.livejournal.com/valentine_smut/) exchange; the prompt was _sugar_ and I tucked it away in there, somewhere. This was my chance to write Hakkai and Sanzo's early relationship; thanks to jenniebart for that opportunity! Thanks also to my lovely beta **whymzycal** , and to the Merciful Goddess for her work!

  
**Free Wine**

  
“Fuckin’ monk,” Gojyo says for what Hakkai is sure is the tenth time today. He tosses his cigarette onto the ground at their feet and heel-grinds it into the dirt with enough force to dig a small hole.

The little clearing in front of their cabin is pocked with several such holes. When they do find Sanzo again, Sanzo should count himself lucky that the Earth has borne the brunt of Gojyo’s worry and anger.

Because they will find Sanzo; Hakkai really has no doubt. He’s just as sure that Sanzo will never openly acknowledge any of the things for which he should be thankful. But that’s just Sanzo.

The sun sinks into the tree-lined horizon below their mountain hideaway. In a last act of power it fires red rays across the sky that seem to set their little clearing on fire. Scientifically, Hakkai knows that the effect is caused by refraction of sunlight through the atmosphere. But in his imagination it makes the leaves, the dirt, and even their skin as red as Gojyo’s hair.

How foolish he'd been to tell Gojyo that it reminded him of his own blood. He never should have have inflicted his own penance and gratitude on Gojyo in that way, though he supposes Gojyo can bear it.

“I’m sure everything will be all right, eventually,” Hakkai murmurs — for at least the tenth time today. “We’ll be fine.”

“How are you so goddamned calm, Hakkai?” Gojyo asks as he lights another cigarette. If he keeps smoking at this pace, he’ll be out of cigarettes soon — not that it would hurt him to quit smoking. Just as it wouldn’t hurt Sanzo.

“I swear,” Gojyo continues around his cigarette. “Just when you think the stupid monk is coming around, acting like he knows who his real friends are, he pulls more bullshit like this. Here I was, thinking he actually was above all that human versus youkai crap. Stupid. Do ya think he wanted to go with that Hazel asshole all along? Was it only Goku he maybe gave a shit about?”

Gojyo is more perceptive than he sounds right now; his emotions are clouding his judgment. But that's just Gojyo. Despite what he says, Gojyo has seen Sanzo being … well, a better Sanzo. And so has Hakkai.

  
“He is a cold-blooded mass murderer,” the Sanbutsushin said.

“With all respect, he did the world a favor,” Sanzo said. He sounded so polite — the first time Gonou had heard him be so. He supposed that even people like Sanzo had to defer to the gods.

Sanzo fascinated him a little. He looked like a divine being himself, gold-haired and delicate and perfectly formed — if a little on the thin and droopy-eyed side — and yet blasphemed and killed and smoked like a street thug.

Gonou was still in a bit of shock at having met such a person, and even survived being pursued by him. He was even more surprised to be in that room, in the blue and white and mist that opened onto eternity, watching his own sentence unfold. To be allowed in the presence of true gods. But then, the Temple of the Setting Sun did not really have a suitable criminal cell for him, so he’d stayed at Sanzo’s side, under his supervision.

“You have taken it upon yourself to judge who is guilty and who is not?” the most female-looking of the aspects said.

“I only submit that there was provocation, and that Hyakugan Maoh was a bigger murderer than Cho Gonou will ever be,” Sanzo said.

Sanzo was wrong, but what Gonou noticed most was that the Sanbutsushin, for all they were gods and above mortal emotion, looked rather wry. Perhaps even smug. They… they _liked_ Sanzo. Gonou knew then that they had already decided he was not to die for his terrible sins. Not with Sanzo around.

He realized he was pleased. The last few days had reminded him that there were such wonders in the world. Such wondrous people. He felt almost … new, at the thought. Soiled, but still …

“And were he to be spared, whose responsibility shall he become?” one of the other aspects said. Gonou wanted to giggle, because giant floating heads were ordering people’s lives. “Shall you undertake his supervision, Genjyo Sanzo?”

“He’ll undertake to supervise himself,” Sanzo said, with a sneering twist to his thin lips.

Gonou did smile a little at that. Sanzo had taken the time to understand him. Sanzo had already decided that Gonou was to be a — a friend, perhaps. Gonou already had three new friends in his new life.

“We shall see,” the Sanbutsushin said as one.

After that were mere details. Sanzo barely looked at Gonou as he passed him on his way out of the … the viewing room, Gonou supposed he might call it. Even so, Gonou understood that he was to follow. In fact, Sanzo did not speak to him until he was ready to return to Chang’An, leaving Gonou behind.

“Get to thinking on what the hell you’re going to call yourself, ‘cause you sure as fuck can’t be Cho Gonou anymore,” he said. Hakkai felt reassured that Sanzo already knew him so well. He was very lucky in his new friends.

  
In their mountain clearing, Hakkai realizes that Gojyo is staring at him, waiting for an answer. “I’m sure Sanzo has his reasons, Gojyo. Reasons that don’t include following Hazel’s mission.”

“Either way, doesn’t that piss you off?”

Hakkai picks and chooses his words, measuring them like he does the ingredients for a cake. “Of course I’m upset. But we should probably worry about Goku and ourselves for a little while,” he says.

Gojyo picks up on something Hakkai should have anticipated. “Yeah, like I know he saw me carrying you, too. You all bloody and broken and slung over my shoulder. Damn, Hakkai, I thought I’d lost ya. But did he even ask how you were on his way outta town? Fuck, no. Fuckin’ monk.”

“True,” Hakkai says.

“Now that’s gotta piss you off,” Gojyo says, shaking another cigarette out of his pack and gesturing at Hakkai with it. “After you healed him how many times?”

“Hmm,” Hakkai says. He feels a flush start in his tight chest and work its way up, soaking his neck and then his face with heat. It wasn’t that he never became irritated with Sanzo; it was nearly impossible to be around Sanzo for any length of time and not want to wring his neck — a little.

Gojyo is flushed, too, or maybe it’s just the fading remnants of sunlight. As the shadows of the trees stretch across the pocked-dirt yard all the way to their porch, Hakkai watches Gojyo light his smoke, its tip bright red-orange in the twilight. He wonders if Gojyo — or Goku, when he wakes — will be able to find honest work to support themselves until Sanzo rejoins them. They’ve all lived such unconventional lives.

“The only thing good about that monk is his gold card. I’ll have to start gambling again for smokes and booze-money,” Gojyo says. He leans his head back and blows smoke up towards the stars.

Hakkai chuckles because Gojyo has read his mind. Still, they might be better off if Hakkai gambles instead, or if they accept charity.

  
For a short while Hakkai lived on the charity of those who took charity, sequestered in a monk’s cell at the Temple of the Setting Sun. He learned to meditate and learned to be Hakkai. He ate food given to the temple. When the few monks who resided there put out a quiet word that these humble beings could use one false eyeball — green — one appeared soon after, a gift from some anonymous craftsman. So Hakkai also learned to see and walk straight again.

Once he’d learned to be Hakkai and to walk without stumbling, he felt prepared and eager to face his new world again, one tiny piece at a time. He walked to Keiun Temple and arrived at night to find Sanzo sitting outside his quarters, alone. Sanzo’s pale everything made him appear to glow from within. Hakkai knew it was mere moonlight and mist, reflecting on Sanzo’s hair, robes, cigarette, and the small ceramic cup he clutched, but the effect was pleasant to look at, anyway.

“Guess you satisfied ‘em,” Sanzo muttered when Hakkai walked up to stand next to him.

“Yes. Cho Hakkai will pay by living,” Hakkai told him. He looked around, soaking in the quiet, cool green and silver and black. “I’m glad. It’s a beautiful evening.”

“Too wet,” Sanzo said, and brought his cup to his lips.

Hakkai caught the scent of plum wine mixed in with Sanzo’s cigarette smoke. He stepped over and sat down next to Sanzo on the porch. He heard a sigh that sounded distinctly annoyed. Sanzo tossed his cigarette into the dirt at his feet.

“Do you not want company?” Hakkai asked, preparing to stand again.

He heard another sigh. “No. You’re fine,” Sanzo said, not sounding pleased, per se, but not angry, either. He looked at Hakkai out of the corner of his eye. “Want some of this?”

“Please,” Hakkai said.

Sanzo leaned back and plucked another cup and a narrow-necked flask from a tray shoved to the back of the porch. For all the extra cup and his mild tone — mild for Sanzo, anyway — Sanzo seemed … unsure, or perhaps embarrassed.

Hakkai’s first sip of the wine made him cough. The wine was not very good. It was definitely alcoholic, but more than a little sour.

Sanzo actually chuckled. “It’s donated.”

“By a very devout but incompetent brewer, perhaps?” Hakkai ventured a second sip, which went down a little more smoothly.

“Free wine is a hell of a lot better than no wine,” Sanzo said, lighting another cigarette.

“True,” Hakkai said, smiling at Sanzo, whom he’d already decided had decided that Hakkai was his friend. The monks at the Temple of the Setting Sun had held Sanzo in such awe. Hakkai was no Buddhist and saw him merely as a person, if an odd and interesting one. “Do you often enjoy the full moons like this?

“Hn,” Sanzo said. He was silent for an extended moment before speaking again. “My old master — he’s dead — used to sit outside like this, drinking.”

“Ah. Waiting for passers-by to quite rudely drop in on him?” Hakkai suggested.

“He was always socializing with some asshole or another,” Sanzo said.

“Ah ha ha,” Hakkai laughed, genuinely. Sanzo could be quite pleasant to socialize with, if one was perceptive and had a thick skin.

The monocle Hakkai had acquired to cover his false eye slipped and he straightened it, focusing his new vision on Sanzo, blurry-white and then distinct-white in the misty evening All of a sudden, Hakkai wanted to touch Sanzo — to squeeze his shoulder or his slender fingers, perhaps — to see if he was warm or as white-cool as he appeared. He didn’t chance it.

“I want things again. It’s a refreshing feeling,” Hakkai did say, feeling emboldened.

Sanzo took a slow sip of wine before speaking. “Just be careful not to want anything you can’t stand to lose,” he said, eventually.

“I shall think on that advice, Sanzo. Thank you. For everything,” Hakkai said. He wondered how much Sanzo believed his own teachings. They often made plenty of sense but were not always so clear-cut in practice. Hakkai drank in silence for a bit, then craned his head to look into the open window of Sanzo’s quarters. “I thought I might greet Goku?”

Sanzo snorted. “He’s asleep. He ate too much, as usual.”

“Too bad.”

“Hn.”

Hakkai set his empty cup down on the wooden porch with a clacking noise that seemed very loud in the quiet night. He wanted to get on with living, but at the same time he wanted to stay right there. He felt as if this were a charmed moment in time, spent with someone who understood enjoyment of the quiet. It was something he suspected would be rather rare in future.

Sanzo tossed his cigarette into the yard to join the others. Without speaking he stood and turned, and when he did his robes brushed against Hakkai’s shoulders. Hakkai could feel Sanzo’s body heat, confirming the fact that yes, Sanzo was human and warm. Then Sanzo shuffled his tabi-stockinged feet along the wooden porch, heading for the door.

“I think I'd like to find Gojyo tomorrow,” Hakkai said.

Sanzo snorted again, though Hakkai wasn’t quite sure why. “You do that,” he said, and went inside.

  
In the forest, Gojyo has calmed down a bit and is smoking his current cigarette with something approaching his usual relaxed posture. It’s nearly dark, with only a sliver of moon and Gojyo’s cigarette to light the outside.

“I should light our oil lanterns and a cooking fire,” Hakkai says. He doesn’t move to go do these things, but at least he’s said it, and that means he knows what he should be doing.

“Aww, screw it,” Gojyo says. The tip of his cigarette turns in Hakkai’s direction, and Hakkai can see a fond grin in the shine of Gojyo’s eyes. “The cooking part, anyway. They gave us plenty of cold stuff that’s still good.”

“Bread and cheese and beer. The simple things in life,” Hakkai says, smiling back.

“Yeah.” Gojyo takes another languid drag from his cigarette. “Rest up. I’m sure we’ll be doin’ plenty of work soon enough , once Goku is … once Goku’s all better. Now that Mister Lazy Asshole Moneybags isn’t around.”

“Hmm.” Gojyo is forgetting that Sanzo really is rather frugal with the gold card — except when it comes to booze and cigarettes, of course. And perhaps the occasional private room for himself.

Hakkai remembers the meager offerings at Keiun Temple — meager as opposed to its grandiose appearance, that is. Things had been much the same at the Temple of the Setting Sun. Monks considered that they did plenty of work to earn their food, being pious and observing the precepts of Buddha so the regular people would not have to.

“Ya think things will ever be like they were?” Gojyo asks, looking up at the emerging stars. “I mean, when they were good. Before we ever left home. Before the Minus Wave thingum. Except without running around doing shit for Sanzo.”

“I don’t know, Gojyo,” Hakkai says. “We are uniquely poised to suffer and survive, either way.”

“Yeah.” Gojyo drops his burned-out cigarette and merely taps his boot against the dirt to extinguish it, rather than add to the plethora of holes in the yard. “We two, we’ve got the best of both worlds and the worst of both worlds all wrapped in one, right? I s’pose we could just keep on doing what we do and get along just as good as we ever did.”

“I hope so,” Hakkai says. The world has changed so much.

  
One moment it was not there, and the next moment it was. Gojyo went out one evening for the first time in a long time, and Hakkai got the feeling that Gojyo was feeling cooped up.

Hakkai was twitchy as well. What he — they — felt could hardly be explained. It was like the premonition of a fever, tiny sparks here and there that ignited all five senses at once.

To distract himself from the feeling, Hakkai cleaned things and baked things. When Gojyo had not returned after a couple of hours and Hakkai began to suspect something truly was wrong with the world, he decided to go visit Sanzo and Goku. Among other things, Sanzo was very good in times of trouble.

When Hakkai arrived at Keiun Temple, Sanzo was alone in his chambers, wearing his black shirt and jeans and sitting at a table set with a familiar ceramic flask and cups. He was smoking and reading a newspaper. Perched on his nose were a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses, the thin, oval kind favored by elderly men. He looked surprisingly cute.

“Little late for fruit arithmetic, isn’t it?” Sanzo said, his charming appearance smudged, as usual, by his gruff voice.

“I baked sweet buns and cookies, and thought you might like some,” Hakkai said. He held out the cloth-covered tray he’d brought.

“I don’t like sugar or sweet things,” Sanzo said without looking up from his newspaper.

Hakkai wasn’t surprised. Sweets for the sweet, went the saying, and he supposed the opposite must be true. “Just very sour wine? Ah ha ha. Where is Goku, may I ask?”

Sanzo _tch_ ed. “The goddamned dog I told him to get rid of years ago had six puppies. They’re finally fucking weaned and now the monkey is out begging door-to-door for homes for them.”

“He didn’t come to our house,” Hakkai said.

Sanzo flipped a page and snapped his newspaper straight with a jerk. “You think you’re not a last resort, huh?”

“I don’t know how Hakuryuu would feel about a puppy,” Hakkai said. He felt better already for being there, as if being around Sanzo had a sort of reverse-light effect on the darkness hovering in the periphery of his world vision. He looked at the flask on the table. “May I have some?”

“It’s no less sour than usual.”

“I don’t care,” Hakkai said. He sat at the table, noting that Sanzo snapped his paper again when he did so. Hakkai ignored the implications and poured himself a cupful of wine, then downed it in one mouth-wrenchingly sour gulp. He poured another cup and did the same. Like before, the wine improved slightly with quantity.

“That stuff’s highly alcoholic,” Sanzo warned from behind his paper.

“Thank you, but I don’t get drunk,” Hakkai said.

When Hakkai tried to refill his glass a second time, the flask was empty and he had to shake out the drops. He clinked it against his cup. At the noise, Sanzo lowered his paper with a sigh and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“Over there,” he said, gesturing at a small hutch in the corner. Then he plucked off his spectacles and laid his hands on the table, lacing his fingers together. “Where is the idiot?”

“Gojyo is out.” As Hakkai refilled the flask from the wine jug in the cabinet, his hands began to shake. Then the skin all over his body tried to tremble all at once. Dark red crept into the corners of his vision and the sound of the wine _glugging_ into the flask sparked the taste of sour plum on his tongue. Hakkai stopped pouring until the effect passed, some few seconds later. He took a deep breath. “Something’s going on, Sanzo. It’s like … there is unseen trouble brewing in the world. It’s very strange. Gojyo feels it, too.”

Sanzo watched Hakkai as he walked back over to the table and sat down, perhaps more intently than he’d ever watched Hakkai before. His gaze took in Hakkai’s forehead, the unhappy slant of his lips, his fingers as he chafed them together reflexively. Hakkai grew warm all over, like the heat of Sanzo’s stare was palpable. Sanzo narrowed his eyes. “Are you _trying_ to sense trouble, Hakkai? Because there shouldn’t be trouble here. Not yet.”

“You sense it, too, then?” Hakkai said, pouring more wine.

“I didn’t say I’d sensed anything,” Sanzo said.

Another wave grew in Hakkai’s eardrums and nerves, and the red crept back, hotter than before. He was glad he was sitting down. He shuddered, perhaps visibly. Sanzo reached out and touched Hakkai’s forehead with three fingers that were warm, yet still felt pleasantly cool.

“Keep your limiters on,” Sanzo said.

Sanzo started to pull his hand away and Hakkai grabbed Sanzo’s wrist, his own fingers quick but gentle. Sanzo didn’t react, just continued to stare at Hakkai with narrowed eyes. Hakkai breathed. Sanzo was like a ground, a ward, something. Sanzo and his sutra and his strange, Sanzo-ish powers.

Hakkai pulled Sanzo’s wrist closer. He set his lips on the inside of it, feeling the veins and pulse just under the surface of Sanzo’s pale skin. He was thanking Sanzo for letting himself be touched, for letting himself be touched by Hakkai when Hakkai wanted to do it

“Hmm,” Sanzo said. He pulled his wrist free and stood, but instead of punching Hakkai like Hakkai suspected he might, he stepped close — not touching, but close — to where Hakkai sat.

Hakkai looked up at Sanzo, looking down at him. When Sanzo still didn’t punch him, Hakkai leaned forward and pushed first his nose and then his lips against Sanzo’s breastbone. He was warm, breathing, and bony under his black silk shirt. Hakkai set his hands on Sanzo’s hips and opened his mouth, breathing wetly onto the silk. He felt Sanzo’s all-over twitch under his fingers.

Hakkai heated again, all over, and smelled smoke and skin and heard every one of both their breaths, amplified, but it wasn’t the … whatever-it-was in the outside world causing the effect. It was Sanzo.

“This helps,” Hakkai whispered.

Sanzo released a small _unh_ as Hakkai slid his fingers under Sanzo’s shirt and rolled it up, then placed his mouth on Sanzo’s bare skin. He had fine blond hairs scattered around his belly, and Hakkai licked them.

“Tch,” Sanzo breathed. “I sure as fuck hope you’re not doing this because you feel obligated or anything. ‘Cause I know about your gratitude thing.”

Hakkai laughed into Sanzo’s navel. “I am grateful. But I hadn’t planned to inflict that particular emotional foible on you.”

“Good,” Sanzo said.

They both liked their quiet time, and so they didn’t talk on the way to Sanzo’s sleep-chamber. Sanzo slid the thin door shut behind them and latched it. Hakkai realized that he had no idea when Goku might be back.

Though he’d been surprised before — more than once that very evening, in fact — Hakkai suspected that Sanzo would not want to be kissed on the lips. So he didn’t. He kissed the smoke-and-incense scent off his skin, just under his jaw, as he worked the fastenings of Sanzo’s jeans.

Sanzo yanked at the waistband of Hakkai’s pants. “Hurry it up,” he ordered.

Hakkai chuckled and pulled Sanzo’s tight jeans down over his hips, freeing his erection, and Hakkai was gratified to discover that Sanzo was just as stimulated as he. Sanzo hissed as Hakkai clutched his cock, circling it in his fingers without grabbing, brushing against his hot skin as delicately as he might handle a bird’s broken wing. Sanzo really was pleasurable to look at and touch, as long as he didn’t speak.

Hakkai gasped when he felt a warm, slender-fingered grip on his own cock. His knees gave way and he dragged Sanzo down with him as he sank to the thin mattress spread on the floor.

For Hakkai, it was the perfect way to ease back into sexual intimacy: purely physical and a little emotionally remote. Sanzo had warned him, once, to essentially not care. Hakkai had known that would be an impossible edict to follow, because he did care, a little. He suspected Sanzo did as well, in his own irascibly strange way. But they both understood each other enough to not let it get in the way.

There were so many ways one could touch another person, and Hakkai had his choice of them. Fellatio interested him and Sanzo’s cock interested him. Hakkai kneeled and, without asking permission, wrapped his lips around the end of Sanzo’s cock. The taste of it was very … interesting. As was the way Sanzo said “ah!” and arched his back, then slammed his hips back down into the mattress as if trying to hide his involuntary movement.

Hakkai pushed his thumb into the groove of Sanzo’s hip to hold him still, and tried it again. He licked some fluid from the end of Sanzo’s cock — semen or his own saliva — and then felt something hit his shoulder. It hit his shoulder twice, then three times.

“Here,” Sanzo said in a hoarse voice. He was knocking at Hakkai’s shoulder with a jar of lubricant.

“Ah. Thank you,” Hakkai said. He wasn’t sure where it was to be applied until Sanzo rolled over to his knees, nearly knocking Hakkai in the head with his shin as he did so. Ah — well, if Sanzo wanted it that way, Hakkai would do it that way.

Sanzo was tense and tight and hot and eventually slicked, and he felt very good around Hakkai’s cock when he eased it in. He felt so good that Hakkai jerked his hips forward a couple of times, rather quickly.

“Slow the fuck down, Hakkai,” Sanzo bitched, his voice sounding strained.

“Just so,” Hakkai said, and eased back into it, eased back into physical pleasure and Sanzo’s body and Sanzo’s breathing and the scent of his hair and skin, incense-soaked from living in the temple. It was probably all a sacrilege, like the scars on Sanzo’s back. Hakkai wondered if Sanzo had been born with his prickly shell of personality or if it had been beaten into him.

Hakkai leaned forward, pulling Sanzo close against him, and pressed the scar on his belly to the scars on Sanzo’s back and moved inside his body and did his best not to care at all. The world changed, anyway.

  
The world has continued changing, even if the specifics remain the same. They fight, they travel, they eat, they sleep, they separate, they reunite. But they change in enough small ways to effect eventual transformations: Goku keeps getting older and growing into the life he was denied so many years. Sanzo learns again and again what it is to care. Gojyo and Hakkai learn how to stop evading their pasts and use them well. And they travel west, until they stop.

“It’s nice out here,” Gojyo says, smiling up at the sky, now awash with stars. “Not a bad place to stay, if we have to stay for a while.”

“We can’t stay long,” Hakkai says, and then wishes he hadn’t.

“I sure hope Goku wakes up soon,” Gojyo says, lighting up again and getting more agitated again if the way he’s yanking the cigarette to and from his mouth with such vigor are any indication. “Even though we’ll haveta tell him. I sure hope he’s all right. What you — we — did had to be done, right? Else we’d’ve never stopped him.”

“Yes. It was necessary,” Hakkai says.

“Yeah.”

“I think he’ll be fine,” Hakkai adds, because Gojyo has started kicking his heel against the wooden porch.

“Yeah,” Gojyo says again.

“I think I might at least light some lanterns,” Hakkai says. He pushes himself up from his seat on the log bench. He does it too quickly and gets lightheaded and weak-kneed. He he stumbles and Gojyo sees it.

“Dammit, Hakkai!” Gojyo says, and tosses his cigarette so that he can sling his arm around Hakkai’s back to hold him up. “You all right? Fucking monk. Son of a bitch.”

“Thank you. I’ll be all right, eventually,” Hakkai says, and lets Gojyo lead him inside the darkened cabin. Gojyo is shaking and Hakkai feels the need to add, “ _We’ll_ be fine, eventually. We’ll survive … together. All of us — even Sanzo.”

“I’ll kill ‘im,” Gojyo says. “When I see him again.”

Hakkai doesn’t answer. He does want to keep all his friends, even those he is angry with.

 **END** _Thank you for reading!_


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